Cousin Darrell is Dead… Finally!

I’ve been trying to remove a particularly bothersome character, Cousin Darrell, from my novel for a while. For those of you following along at home — he’s dead. At last. Or, more properly, he has ceased to have ever existed.

This coincides with me reading a passage in Donald Maass’s “Writing the Breakout Novel” about keeping the number of characters to a minimum. I am tempted, indeed, to put the nix on another one of the troublesome Bascom cousins… But I don’t think I should. If I do, some of the plot changes get pretty intense.